[kramlogan]

In the poem What It’s like to Be a Black Girl by Patricia Smith, there was several different tones that came to me when I read the poem. In this poem I felt a lot of pain, suffering and courage. After I read the poem I thought about a little girl losing her innocence, a little girl getting raped. “it’s dropping food coloring in your eyes to make them turn blue and suffering the burn in silence”. In this line it shows how much pain she was in. Dropping food coloring in your eyes will burn, however to do it in silence is a statement that not much people can make. I personal would be screaming in pain. Also I believe that the color blue plays a critical role in this line. The blue color can stand for many things including pain, sadness, and even death. “It’s sweat and Vaseline and bullets”, this was another powerful line in the poem. This was the line that originally gave me the idea of a violent rape. This was where the suffering came in. For someone to endure this treatment over and over again is suffering to the maximum. I find that this little girl has been through much more than what we can imagine. For every dark cloud there is a silver lining. It may be hard to think about a silver lining in this story, however there is one. One of the best things a rape victim can do to start coping after the fact is talking about it. I believe that writing this poem was a very good start to dealing with this tragic problem that many men and woman face.

[moriama]

I think that was nicely put, But I had a different interpretation on this poem. I thought she was talking about that at the age of 9 years old girls usually goes through puberty. There is part where she states that “like the edges are wild, like thers’s something, everything, wrong” I look at that line that her body is going through changes and she doesn’t know how to feel. Where she states “it’s dropping food coloring in your eyes to make them blue and suffering their burn in silence” I think it was the time frame when racism occurred. And where she stated ” it’s finding a space between your legs, a disturbance at your chest” experiences puberty she realizing that her breasts are growing. There are some many ways we probably could analyze this poem, but I must agree with you that for every dark cloud there is a silver lining.